World-renowned linguist and U.S. foreign policy critic Noam Chomsky addressed an audience of about 500 people at BU last night, lashing out at what he calls Israel’s “escalating policy of apartheid,” which he believes is in some respects worse than the longtime degradation of the nonwhite majority in South Africa.

Chomsky spoke at the invitation of the BU student group Students for Justice in Palestine as part of the University’s first-time participation in Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), a series of events held in cities and campuses across the globe. According to its Web site, prominent Palestinians, Jewish anti-Zionists, and South Africans have been at the forefront of the IAW effort to exert pressure on Israel “to alter its current structure and practices as an apartheid state.”

“The world works like the Mafia, and we’re the don,” Chomsky said. “You do what we say or else.” Israel is on its way to becoming a pariah state, he continued, yet like South Africa, it receives increasingly lonely U.S. support.

Now, the level of heart defects among newborn babies is said to be 13 times higher than in Europe.

BBC world affairs editor John Simpson visited a new, US-funded hospital in Fallujah where paediatrician Samira al-Ani told him that she was seeing as many as two or three cases a day, mainly cardiac defects.

Our correspondent also saw children in the city who were suffering from paralysis or brain damage – and a photograph of one baby who was born with three heads.

one doctor in the city had compared data about birth defects from before 2003 – when she saw about one case every two months – with the situation now, when, she saw cases every day.

based on data from January this year, the rate of congenital heart defects was 95 per 1,000 births – 13 times the rate found in Europe.

As the U.S. continues its Iraq withdrawal show — even while the supposed withdrawal deadline is seriously in doubt — what is happening right now in the city of Fallujah is a devastating reminder of what the war has wrought.

According to the BBC, “Doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are reporting a high level of birth defects, with some blaming weapons used by the U.S. after the Iraq invasion.”

“Now, the level of heart defects among newborn babies is said to be 13 times higher than in Europe.”

Neurologists and obstetricians in the city interviewed by the Guardian say the rise in birth defects — which include a baby born with two heads, babies with multiple tumors, and others with nervous system problems — are unprecedented and at present unexplainable.

The U.S. military has feigned ignorance about its role in this pediatric health crisis — “No studies to date have indicated environmental issues resulting in specific health issues,” a military spokesperson told the BBC

The first battle of Fallujah, in April 2004, destroyed much of the city, once known as the “City of Mosques.” The second battle, in November and December of that year, more or less finished the job, bringing, aside from death and destruction, the insidious substance known as white phosphorus.

“The brutal destruction of Fallujah by the American army was not followed by any reconstruction, as if the city is being punished for its attitude against the occupation,” an engineer in Fallujah told IPS journalists

[I]n 2006, they found “5,928 new illness cases that were unknown before in Fallujah,” over 70 percent of which were “cancers and abnormalities” in children below 12 years of age.

In the first six months of 2007 there were 2,447 cases, more than 50 percent of these cases were children.